Systems and methods are known in the art for tracking time attendance and location of employees. Commonly, employees are required to clock-in and clock-out when checking in and checking out of work respectively. Various devices can be found for time attendance tracking, frequently by the use of time clock installed within office and/or work premises using punch cards, identity card and even fingerprints. While time tracking is achievable for workers within their work premises, time attendance of workers outside work premises such as business trips and/or customer visiting are unable to be tracked. There also exists the possibility that time attendance devices at a job site are not functioning, damaged due to vandalism and/or even stolen. In such a case, it would be highly desirable for the supervisor, manager and/or foreman to be able to not only track his and/or her time, but also track the time of the employees at that job site.
Therefore, there is a need for a system to track time attendance and location of employees even out of work premises. Such system should also provides a way for employees not having such devices to record their attendances without having to go through a cumbersome request of authorized password method and can be done through a one-time registration method.
User profile is one of the important data in attendance system. Many systems require the system administrator to key in the user data manually and some systems allow the system administrator to import data from digital files to ease the data entry work. However, creating new user data and profile in a new system may be time consuming.
Leave application is another important process in attendance system Most of the companies rely on paperwork system, where employees must fill up and submit form to apply for leave. Managers and/or superiors must sign on the form to approve and/or deny the application.
Overtime working hours and pays affect operation costs in all industries. Management always keep an eye to overtime claim to ensure additional pays are worth when compared to the profit margin. Conventionally, companies still rely on paperwork to record and approve overtime claim, which requires lots of administration works and calculations. Although the electronic system can reduces the workload, managers and/or superiors must check all the claims before approvals. Furthermore, managers and/or superiors cannot pre-schedule overtime working time schedules for staff, nor to pre-approve all overtime claim within specific time durations. Under the usual circumstances, employees can only start work overtime after their manager and/or superior instructs them to do so but they may not receive the instruction and/or approval in time.
Therefore, there is a need exist for attendance system to provide an instant communication platform to allow interaction between the employees and their superior so as to ease the administrative workload.
Until now, time attendance tracking through wireless devices can be found by a number of patented technologies. Of interest is U.S. Pat. No. 8,126,788 which discloses a method for selectively tracking time attendance for either a single dedicated user and/or multiple non-dedicated users using a single multifunction electronic hand-held device. A time tracking software application is installed on the device to enable the dedicated user and non-dedicated users to clock-in and/or clock-out in a solo mode and in multiple users mode respectively. However, this prior art disclosed that the switching of the solo mode to the multiple users mode on the device and/or the other way around requires an authorized password, which could be troublesome.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,835,955 discloses a time attendance system that provides a device having a periodically changing code which is synchronized with a time clock associated with a service location. While the prior art discloses a system to track actual location and time of employees, it does not explore the importance of deterring buddy punching by limiting user of a computing device used for time attendance reporting. Moreover, the prior art focuses on tracking traveling time between a departure location and an arrival location by the computing device. Misuse of the computing device for buddy punching is therefore not explained which may be not a concern for this prior art.